The communications industry is rapidly changing to accommodate emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. Customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications are driving communications network and systems providers to use networks and systems having greater speed and capacity. In particular, routers and switches that typically forward data packets within and between networks, face increasingly high performance demands. Routers perform packet classification and IP lookups to forward data packets based on information categories, network configurations and other considerations. In addition, routers may perform admission control, firewall and intrusion detection, policy based routing, resource reservation, per-flow queuing, and various other functions. The various functionalities of the router, coupled with growing network demand, drive a need for faster throughput, higher efficiency, better performance router configurations.